Some people just love doing homework, and if they can do it while validating their nerdy hobby, they will. Plus people love having “background noise”.

I think there’s good ones out there for sure. Jacob Geller is cool. But a lot of it is just people summarizing things for 5 hours and not providing any real insight.

tiktok stole all of youtube’s normal people audience

nerds and geeks haven’t moved on to tiktok because it’s too mainstream/basic/CCP spyware

I’m not joking btw, it’s what I’ve actually observed irl

i was just complaining about this, i watch reviewers and there’s an increasing amount of suggestions that look like review but are amateur, uncritical, and poorly made. you can’t really tell the difference between a Warlockracy or Mandaloregaming and the witless imitators at a glance

If you make a video essay about a show or movie you’ll get copyright striked for including a few seconds of video or audio, if you make a video essay about a game you can include your own gameplay of it for basically the entire runtime

Treatbrain addled zoomer content creators have discovered that they can do video essays too?

i realize how precious this sounds but i think there’s a difference between a video essay (like a video that tries to make some kind of point) and someone talking for 40 minutes, and i think a lot of the time people are referring to the latter even though it’s completely different.

Because the rise of streaming directly competes with long form let’s plays? If you want to talk about gaming related content its either streaming, let’s plays or commentary.

Also let’s plays “evolved” even more into these heavily edited 30 minute videos out of 2-6h footage and most channels can’t afford that. Look at channels like Real Civil Engineer and say how are you going to make a “normal” video about CS or whatever while competing with a dipshit that edits his videos for 12yo children? You can’t afford this much editing unless you’re full time.

Idk… perhaps the algorithm, perse… no one knows what captivates the audiences attention, through there.

Should just stay away from algorithms man they’re literally designed to drive people to madness

Tbh while video essays have definitely exploded and plenty of them are low effort, I don’t think this is something I can bring myself to consider a problem. At least at the core of even the lamest video essays, they are writing something, trying to convince me of something, trying to express love of something, etc. As time passes I have a feeling this kind of content will disappear as it becomes more and more incentivized for a place like YouTube to stop offering to host your 3 hour essay about “Why Barney Was Darker Than You Remember” and shifts towards denser and smaller content forms to compete with its peers.

Video essays about music can be corny. Usually it’s just a documentary recapping someone’s life (full of inaccurate info) or “analysis” about why a rapper or singer is failing and it’s just based on vibes and 3 twitter screenshots and nothing factual